De Blasio promises action on property taxes—a political third rail

Comments come two days before finance commissioner debates issue with group suing city

Something is afoot on one of the city’s diciest policy issues: property taxes.

Mayor Bill de Blasio promised Tuesday his office would soon move to reform property taxes—two days before his finance commissioner will appear at an event with a group suing to change them.

The mayor made the remarks at an unrelated afternoon press conference in Brooklyn, more than a year after he said he would assemble “a task force or whatever” to examine the city’s patchwork, piecemeal property tax system.

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The group Tax Equity Now—an odd-couple coalition of civil rights groups and real estate powerhouses—have sued, alleging that owners of some dwellings get favorable treatment at the expense of minorities.

De Blasio reiterated his promise to tackle the “massive undertaking” in the near future, and noted that it would involve changes in both city and state laws. He declined to provide further details.

“We will have much more to say on the property tax issue in the next few weeks. It’s clearly a priority for the second term,” he said Tuesday. “We will, I believe, fundamentally, we will end up with a more straightforward, more transparent, more consistent property-tax system for homeowners and co-op owners and condo owners. But we have to ultimately be revenue-neutral in terms of its impact on the whole city. And those are the ground rules that I will proceed with.”

That means if taxes are reduced on some properties, they would be raised on others by the same amount. The prospect of a tax increase on owners of one- to three-family homes, which would trigger a political outcry, has kept city politicians from even attempting to reform the system for years.

The mayor refused to say whether he would actually impanel a task force on the matter.

“You’re going hear some very specific actions soon,” he said.

During the era of urban decay in the 1970s and 1980s, New York extended numerous breaks and benefits to the predominantly Caucasian owners of houses, co-ops and condos to stem white flight. Among these benefits are statutes barring the city from raising a property’s assessment more than 6% in a year or 20% over five years.

In recent decades, property values in prosperous white enclaves such as Park Slope have shot up, but the caps have kept their tax bills from rising proportionally. This, according to lawsuit plaintiffs Tax Equity Now New York, has increased the burden on farther-flung precincts of the city, where many homeowners and tenants (whose rents are inflated by property taxes) are minorities.

The mayor owns two row houses in Park Slope, making him a beneficiary of the present system—but he has expressed sympathy with the plaintiffs. However, he has contested Tax Equity Now’s claims that the system is racially imbalanced, perhaps to avoid putting the city’s Law Department at a disadvantage in the pending lawsuit.

Which is why it is strange that Jacques Jiha, the man de Blasio has tasked with heading the city Department of Finance and administering the current tax system, is scheduled to appear at a Manhattan Chamber of Commerce event titled “Reforming the Property Tax in NYC” Thursday morning with his predecessor Martha Stark, Tax Equity Now’s director of policy. Also on the program are Citizens Budget Commission President Carol Kellermann and Real Estate Board of New York President John Banks—both endorsers of the Tax Equity Now Suit—as well as de Blasio’s former commissioner of the Department of Housing and Preservation, Vicki Been.

The city’s Law Department did not immediately respond to a question about why it would allow Jiha to speak in a public forum with the group fighting the city in court, on the very matter they are fighting about. But both the group and the mayor have said they would prefer the city fix property taxes on its own, rather than have a judge do so.